We begin The Catherine Cookson Experience with “The Glass Virgin.” This miniseries was the one that started it all – and stopped it all, since I didn’t go back to another one for over a decade. By the end of my re-watch, I knew why.

The Glass Virgin is about a young girl, raised as gentility, who finds out she’s actually the daughter of a whore and therefore socially untenable. Distraught, she leaves the house with estate groom (and total hottie) Manuel in tow. Will she make it in a cruel working world? Will he make it into a life as his own man? Will they, you know, Make It?

NOTE: These screencaps are awful. I can’t do better. Think of it as part of the joy, like that soundstage echo in the 1970s Masterpiece Theatres.

Era: 1870s
Heroine: Annabella LeGrange, gentlewoman, seventeen, dumb as a sack of hair
Siblings that require looking-after: None, unless you count Annabella.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Self.
Asshole Father?: Check!
Romantic interest(s): Manual Mendoza, the groom at her estate
Bairnsketballs: None
Fistfights: Four

“MANUEEEEEL!”
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So, before we begin dissecting individual episodes, there are some things we need to talk about. They are not spoilers, per se; that would imply that knowing about them spoils how the plot will go, which implies that there is any plot to begin with, which is very sweet of you to think but not really so much what Catherine Cookson was good at. So these aren’t so much spoilers as they are ingredients; combining them in different ways produces different kinds of cookies in an unsurprising but delicious process.

Please be warned; some of Catherine’s favorite tropes are totally skeevy. I’ll label the episodes that have nasty goings-on, so those who would rather not deal can just skip.

On to the tropes!

Class Issues: Universal theme that more or less singlehandedly pilots the plot of every single one of these suckers. I have not seen a Cookson miniseries with fewer than three social classes in the mix. If she had a primary obsession, it would be this.

Illegitimate Bairns: If she had a secondary obsession, it would be this. Cookson’s heroines are a spectacularly fertile bunch. If you’re in one of her books, be warned – you fall on a peen just once and you are probably going to turn up with a bairn*. If the heroine isn’t having an illegitimate bairn of her own, she probably is one, or her sister’s having one, or she’s going to end up marrying one. (Hopefully when he’s older.)

* Note: All bairns are portrayed by half a basketball strapped to the heroine’s waist. Poor little bairnsketballs.

Oh, that’s not all.
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Man, I always want to slap an “e” in there. I have to stop myself every time.

This week, Kings hit the gas and delivered a great episode, which I talk about at Tor.com.

Not that it matters, since the show is cancelled so hard it’s basically cancelled twice, but it’s good to know that the writing team did have a plan for all those intro segments from the first two episodes.

I didn’t even care that we saw little of Eamonn Walker this week, or any Wes Studi (except that there’s never enough Wes Studi), because the plots they did push forward made sense and actually went somewhere, and most things related to the episode itself instead of some vague promise to mention it again four episodes from now, king-in-a-cave.

I still cringe every time David and Michelle have a scene together. She’s monstrously bad, and he’s little better. Watching Sebastian Stan try to boss, scheme against, and seduce Katrina Ghent was MAGNITUDES more interesting.

Let’s talk Katrina Ghent for a second. I love that the first attempt on her perceived sensuality was shot down like a paper plane in a glue fight (I don’t know what that means, I just said it). I love that she went behind Jack’s back after ONE DAY of working with him. I love that she erred on the side of compassion, and not because she’s a Compassionate Lady, but because the case just happened to strike her that way. Plus, it brings her a little closer to the king.

DAMN YOU, NBC. I would have paid good money to watch Katrina Ghent become Bathsheba or something by Season 4, but nooooooo!

When I was fifteen, my French teacher lent me The Glass Virgin.

“You’ll appreciate this someday,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

I watched it, and promptly forgot most of it. I retained some vague memories of a dude slathering himself with a lady’s bathwater as a sign of love (no joke), and a spindly woman shouting “Manuel!” at the top of her lungs, but it vanished into my memory and became a soft, pulpy mess. Given how I usually cling to movie memories more than any memories of my actual life, this seemed strange; I decided it must not have been very good, and as the years passed I assumed my French teacher had simply been wrong.

A few weeks ago, a friend came to visit and handed me a DVD.

“You’ll appreciate this,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

It was The Moth. I watched it twice in one day, sat back, and realized what my teacher had meant.

They are pulpy, social-commentary, random-romance, varying-production-values crack, and they’re hysterical.

I am in the process of devouring all I can get my hands on, and will be reporting here, to make sure that no incorrect hoop skirt, longing glance, windswept vista, class struggle, cave dwelling, pointless romantic interest, interrupted molest attempt, bastard dad, random occupation, or illegitimate bairn gets lost in the shuffle. I can’t promise perfection, though, since it’s possible to watch some of these and feel like you missed a plot point, only to realize later there was no plot to begin with.

Despite her issues (and girl has issues), I think she occupies some strange, ever-shifting space between Dickens and Nora Roberts, where women try to fight a class system that oppresses them and keep falling on penises by mistake.

Join me tomorrow as I begin digging through the luster of Awesome British Actor Camp graduates, past the visible chemises, to the stinky, mushy pulp that pulses in the very core of these overblown dramas.

I bet she has a list on her dresser:

PEOPLE TO DRESS AS NEXT

Mad Max
St. Lucia Celebration
Lovechild of Mad Hatter and Alice
An eggplant